It may only have been a matter of minutes but for many New Yorkers it seemed so much longer - and so terribly reminiscent. A pall of thick black smoke hung over the Manhattan skyline. Bits of the tail wing of a plane lay scattered on the pavement. Two floors of a tower block were engulfed in an intense blaze.

Shortly before 3pm yesterday, New York City went through it all again. In 72nd Street on the Upper East Side, just five miles from ground zero, crowds assembled as news spread that a small aircraft had ploughed into the 30th and 31st storeys of the 50-floor Belair building. Manhattan's wide avenues were clogged with emergency vehicles and helicopters hovered overhead as crews of firefighters prepared to enter the building. And in the most eerie echo of five years ago, the mobile phone networks jammed as people rushed to telephone their loved ones.

Even the Pentagon got in on the act, ordering fighter jets to scramble over several cities including New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Seattle.

And then, details began to emerge. The crash had been of a single-engine light plane that had swerved off its path over the East River. It looked like an accident. And then another telling detail: at the controls had been a celebrity, a pitcher with America's largest baseball club, the New York Yankees. Cory Lidle was identified as the owner of the Cirrus SR20 plane and one of the two victims - the other being his flying instructor.

Twenty-one people - most of them firefighters - were taken to hospital.

The city's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, giving a public address shortly after the accident, touched on how New York's nerves had momentarily been tweaked: "Everybody is sensitive when a plane goes into a building. But homeland security sees no evidence of anything relating to terrorism or anything remotely like it."

Lidle, 34, had acquired his pilot's licence only a few months ago and had been planning to head for California where he intended to spend the off-season improving his piloting skills.

Ironically, he had bought the Cirrus model because he thought it was safe. "The whole plane has a parachute on it," he told the New York Times last month. "Ninety-nine per cent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and the 1% that do usually land it. But if you're up in the air and something goes wrong, you pull that parachute and the whole plane goes down slowly."

The paper quoted one of his instructors as saying: "He was probably my best student. He learned very, very quickly, and a lot of it is desire. He had huge desire."

The Cirrus took off from New Jersey's Teterboro airport, across the Hudson river from Manhattan, at 2.25pm. Radar signals showed the plane circling the Statue of Liberty then flying over the East River alongside Manhattan at 1,500 feet. It then turned into Manhattan and lost height very rapidly to just 400 feet. At that point the radar signal was lost.

A federal official, speaking to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said the plane sent a distress call to the Federal Aviation Authority before it crashed.

Henry Neimark, a pilot who witnessed the accident while driving along the Brooklyn to Queens expressway, said he saw a plane banking very steeply to the left over the East River at a height of 700 or 800 feet. "It was very odd to see a plane manoeuvring so close to the ground - doing what almost looked like acrobatics," he said. "I suddenly saw it hit the building in a huge ball of flames."

Richard Drutman, a professional photographer who lives on the building's 11th floor, said he was speaking on the telephone when he felt the building shake. "There was a huge explosion. I looked out my window, and saw what appeared to be pieces of wings, on fire, falling from the sky." He and his girlfriend quickly left the building, he said.

Witnesses reported the sense of panic when the plane struck. "I just saw something come across the sky and crash into that building. There was fire, debris and an explosion," said Young May Cha, 23, a medical student at Cornell University.

A mystery writer, Carol Higgins Clark, who lives on the 38th floor of the building, was coming home in a cab when she saw the smoke. "Thank goodness I wasn't at my apartment at the time," she said.

The FAA said it was too early to determine what caused the crash. One question the authorities will address is how the plane managed to reach airspace above residential areas of Manhattan, which has been strictly prohibited since the September 11 attacks five years ago.